Author: Adam Bergh

Four years ago, Veeam delivered to the market ground-breaking native snapshot integration into NetApp’s flagship ONTAP storage operating system. In addition to operational simplicity, improved efficiencies, reduced risk and increased ROI, the Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform and ONTAP continues to help customers of all sizes accelerate their Digital Transformation initiatives and compete more effectively in the digital economy.

Today I’m pleased to announce a native storage integration with Element Software, the storage operating system that powers NetApp HCI and SolidFire, is coming to Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 with the upcoming Update 4.

Key milestones in the Veeam + NetApp Alliance

Veeam continues to deliver deeper integration across the NetApp Data Fabric portfolio to provide our joint customers with the ability to attain the highest levels of application performance, efficiency, agility and Hyper-Availability across hybrid cloud environments. Together with NetApp, we enable organizations to attain the best RPOs and RTOs for all applications and data through native snapshot based integrations.

How Veeam integration takes NetApp HCI to Hyper-Available

With Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 3, we released a brand-new framework called the “Universal Storage API.” This set of API’s allows Veeam to accelerate the adoption of storage-based integrations to help decrease impact on the production environment, significantly improve RPOs and deliver significant operational benefits that would not be attainable without Veeam.

Let’s talk about how the new Veeam integration with NetApp HCI and SolidFire deliver these benefits.

This process dramatically improves backup performance, with the added benefit of reducing performance impact on production VMware infrastructure.

Granular application item recovery from Element Storage Snapshots

If you’re a veteran of enterprise storage systems and VMware, you undoubtably know the pain of trying to recover individual Windows or Linux files, or application items from a Storage Snapshot. The good news is that Veeam makes this process fast, easy and painless. With our new integration into Element snapshots, you can quickly recover application items directly from the Storage Snapshot like:

Individual Windows or Linux guest files

Exchange items

MS SQL databases

Oracle databases

Microsoft Active Directory items

Microsoft SharePoint items

What’s great about this functionality is that it works with a Storage Snapshot created by Veeam and NetApp, and the only requirement is that VMs need to be in the VMDK format.

Hyper-Available VMs with Instant VM Recovery from Element Snapshots

Everyone knows that time is money and that every second that a critical workload is offline your business is losing money, prestige and possibly even customers. What if I told you that you could recover an entire virtual machine, no matter the size in a very short timeframe? Sound farfetched? Instant VM Recovery technology from Veeam which leverages Element Snapshots for NetApp HCI and SolidFire makes this a reality.

Not only is this process extremely fast, there is no performance loss during this process, because once recovered, the VM is running from your primary production storage system!

Veeam Instant VM Recovery on NetApp HCI

Element Snapshot orchestration for better RPO

It’s common to see a nightly or twice daily backup schedule in most organizations. The problem with this strategy is that it leaves your organization with a large data loss potential of 12-24 hours. We call the amount of acceptable data loss your “RPO” or recovery point objective. Getting your RPO as low as possible just makes good business sense. With Veeam and Element Snapshot management, we can supplement the off-array backup schedule with more frequent storage array-based snapshots. One common example would be taking hourly storage-based snapshots in between nightly off-array Veeam backups. When a restore event happens, you now have hourly snapshots, or a Veeam backup to choose from when executing the recovery operation.

Put your Storage Snapshots to work with Veeam DataLabs

Wouldn’t it be great if there were more ways to leverage your investments in Storage Snapshots for additional business value? Enter Veeam DataLabs — the easy way to create copies of your production VMs in a virtual lab protected from the production network by a Veeam network proxy.

The big idea behind this technology is to provide your business with near real-time copies of your production VMs for operations like dev/test, data analytics, proactive DR testing for compliance, troubleshooting, sandbox testing, employee training, penetration testing and much more! Veeam makes the process of test lab rollouts and refreshes easy and automated.